


Paper clips

by apicturewithasmile



Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Capital Punishment, F/M, Happy End!, Lizzington - Freeform, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, also if you're a big fan of Donald Ressler this isn't the fic for you, buuuuut, he doesn't appear but boy do I take my opportunity to drag him in his absence, oh yes this bitch angsty!!! READ!!!, trigger warnings for:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apicturewithasmile/pseuds/apicturewithasmile
Summary: Liz finds out about Red's illness and confronts him about it - in a very diplomatic and understanding way because despite the picture that canon paints, ~my~ Red and Liz are actually able to have an open and honest conversation so what's not to like about that?
Relationships: Elizabeth Keen/Raymond Reddington
Comments: 9
Kudos: 90





	Paper clips

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a doctor so don't @ me if the little tiny bit of medical stuff I had to put in isn't correct. As if the TBL writers ever cared about accuracy, right?!

Paper clips. Liz never thought that working for the FBI would provide her with such a detailed knowledge of the many unique ways one could bind two or more pieces of paper together. Part of her job was to write endlessly boring case reports, further complicated by the trouble of having to bend the truth here and there so as not to interfere with the secrets that shaped her life – be it those she desperately needed to keep for herself or the kind that she felt necessary to unlock.

Naturally she procrastinated writing her case reports until Cooper would give her the same diplomatic yet strict speech that translated to “do your damn homework or you’re grounded!” Then she’d have to glue herself to her desk and finish three months’ worth of bureaucracy in one exhausting all-nighter at the Post Office.

Tonight was such a night and despite it being way past 10pm and most of her colleagues having gone home, she still had trouble getting any work done. She was constantly being interrupted by banal little things such as: paper clips – or rather the lack thereof. She rummaged through her desk drawers in the hopes of finding a spare package but without success.

Maybe she could take some of Ressler’s. She went over to his desk – so neatly organised. The desk of a man who was evidently not once in his life behind on case reports. However, there were no paper clips on the desktop, so Liz pretended to go through a cycle of moral pondering about whether she was allowed to open her colleague’s desk drawers or not and then decided that Ressler wouldn’t mind. She was just looking for paper clips after all and that wasn’t even a lie. But what she found when she opened the bottom drawer would make it hard to sell her innocent search for stationary as the truth that it was, should she ever decide to confront Donald with her findings.

It was a brown cardboard folder, the kind they had used to put their case reports in for easy and clear filing purposes, the kind she had spent the past four hours filling up with various reports. But this one wasn’t labelled and numbered the way they were supposed to be; instead it had the initials “R.R.” on the front in Ressler’s handwriting. As if to make it even more painfully obvious that this stood for “Raymond Reddington”, he had used a red sharpie pen.

She took a deep breath, then grabbed the folder, closed the drawer and went back to her own desk where she flipped through it at random. The folder became heavier in her hands the more she realised what content it housed. What looked like a case report at first glance was revealing itself to be an array of medical reports, or rather copies thereof. Some pages where copied at a weird angle, partially cut off or blurry; the copying was obviously done in a hurry.

But Liz didn’t feel like brainstorming how Ressler could’ve possibly gotten his hands onto this. Too shocking were the implications of the picture being painted in front of her eyes as she skimmed through the folder. Despite not understanding most of the medical terms and Latin words, they still spoke to her in a frighteningly clear voice: he’s dying.

* * *

Red had just fallen asleep after two hours of battling against his insomnia when he got pulled away from the beginning of a nightmare by someone knocking at his bedroom door. Nightmares had become a normal part of his life, in fact he considered them to be somewhat refreshing since they were rarely worse than the memories he had to live with when awake. Regardless, he was still glad Dembe had such impeccable timing and saved him from whatever horrors his subconscious mind was about to make up.

He turned on the lamp on his nightstand, oriented himself in the room, and answered. “Come in.”

The door opened slowly with a squeaking noise so ugly that any normal person would’ve fixed it years ago. But Red thought of it as a build-in burglar alarm. Should anyone try to gain access to his bedroom during the rare occasion that he was actually in bed and sleeping, that squeaking was guaranteed to wake him up and give him a last-minute chance to grab the pistol he kept under his pillow.

“I’m sorry to wake you, Raymond.” Dembe said. “But Elizabeth is on the phone. She sounds… upset.”

Red stood up so fast it made him feel dizzy. He had to hold on to bedpost to steady himself. Yet another new symptom he still needed to get used to. “Is she in danger?”

“I don’t think so,” Dembe answered, pressing the phone against his chest to mute their conversation. “But she sounds like she’s been crying.”

Red took the phone from Dembe, then he gave him a look that said “close the door behind you, please”. As soon as the bedroom door had squeaked shut and he was alone again, Red held the phone to his ear and sat down on the edge of his bed. “Elizabeth? Are you okay?”

For a few seconds all he could hear was the sound of her breathing, but then her broken voice submitted to a “no”.

“What happened?”

“I need to ask you something and I expect you to give me the dignity of an honest answer. No stories, no distractions, so omissions. Just a direct clear answer to my question. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Red replied, taken aback by the sudden matter-of-fact attitude in Liz’s voice.

“How long do you have left?”

That question was a punch in the gut, sent from the other side of town and inflicted only through sound. Only Elizabeth Keen had that kind of power over him.

“I know that you’re sick.” she added.

He certainly began to feel like it. The dizziness was back, the room around him started turning, shrinking with each rotation until it would crush him. How did she know? Ressler – that backstabbing son of a condescending bitch. But Red couldn’t even really blame him. It was his own fault after all for trusting a single word coming out of Donald Ressler’s mouth.

“Raymond! Say something!” Her voice broke at the last syllable and drifted into a failed attempt at hiding the fact she was crying again.

Being reminded of his own mortality wasn’t the issue – death had been part of his reality for decades and he has made his peace with it. But hearing her pain, knowing she would be devastated to learn about his illness and his own growing desire to resolve their differences before he’d leave this world for good – that’s what made this so hard for him.

“A year.” He finally forced himself to say, hardly any more successful than her at swallowing his tears. “Maybe two if I’m lucky.”

Silence on the other end.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” he said. “Whichever way you found out about this, it’s not how it should’ve been. I admit that I was scared to tell you and I didn’t want you to worry about me. But in the interest of full disclosure: Up until a few days ago I actually thought my doctors might have found a treatment. But turns out they didn’t. So much for luck.”

He let those words linger in the air for a little while until he surprised himself by speaking what was on his mind. “Can I come over? I’d really like to see you.”

Even more surprising was her answer. “Yes, please!”

* * *

When Liz opened her apartment door half an hour later she saw a different man than the one she expected. It sure was Red but against all odds he wasn’t wearing his regular suit of armour; no vest, no button-down shirt, no tie or fedora. In front of her in all his vulnerable glory stood Raymond Reddington in navy blue pyjama pants and a white t-shirt; his winter coat was hanging loosely from his shoulders – a size too big on him without the amount of textile he would usually wear underneath it. He looked small.

“Sorry about the outfit.” he said as if he had read her mind. “I came as fast as I could.”

“That’s alright.” She made a quick hand gesture to let him know she wanted him to come inside, then she closed the door behind him.

He stepped through into her living room where he took his coat off and hung it over the armrest of her sofa. “I assume I have to thank Agent Ressler for this.”

“Promise me you won’t kill him for it.”

Red pouted his lips while making a face that suggested he was still weighing his options, then dismissed his thoughts with a wave of hand. “I missed my window of opportunity for killing him. What difference would it make now? He’s already told you.”

“Actually he didn’t. I found copies of your medical files in his cabinet.”

Red threw her a look that said “not judging you but why where you snooping around in his cabinet?”

“I was looking for paper clips.” she defended herself.

Red stared at her with an open mouth for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Isn’t that refreshing? You _accidentally_ stumbling upon a secret of mi–”

Liz couldn’t take it anymore, pretending like they were having just a normal conversation. She leaped forward and hugged him tightly; pushing herself against his body as if that would safe him.

“I don’t want to lose you.” she whispered into his neck.

“I know.” he said. He leaned in to her embrace, his arms wrapped gently around her, one hand stroking her hair, the other one resting on her back. They hadn’t done this in too long.

Eventually she dared to let go and look at him through tearstained eyes. “Let’s sit down.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the sofa. They sat in opposite corners, turned towards each other so their knees were just an inch away from touching. It was a strange space they created between them as if they both needed distance to recover from the intensity of the hug they had just shared.

It was Red who broke the silence that began to overtake the room. “It’s an auto-immune disorder that affects my heart. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of that. I was also surprised to find I still have one.”

Liz didn’t grace his joke with a reaction. She was still grasping at the last few straws of hope. “Is there really no treatment?”

“To reduce the symptoms, yes, but not the cause. It’s genetic.”

She nodded slowly, trying to treat this like a simple math problem that just needed to be solved. “What about stem cells? Don’t they use these for genetic disorders all the time?”

He leaned back, increasing the distance between them and straightening his posture as if to appear more professional. “I’d need a living relative for that.”

“Of course. And you don’t have one.”

Red shrugged. “Not to my knowledge at least. And I figured it’d be easier to hire a bunch of ethically challenged physicians and pharmacists to do their own research for a treatment rather than attempting to track down every woman I ever had sex with to see whether there’s a child out there with an unusual appetite for stroganoff and Cuban cigars.”

“I can’t believe you’re using this opportunity to brag about your conquests.” she hissed at him, then looked away in a futile attempt to hide the subtle traces of a smile appearing on her lips.

“I’m sorry.” he said, moving his head as if to sneak around an imaginary corner in search of eye-contact which, after some hesitation, she granted him eventually. “Dying is just no fun without making fun of it.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“I am.” he admitted. “But not in the way that you think. I’ve always been quite content knowing that my life could be over at any given moment. Who’s to guarantee that I even have that one year? I could get shot in the street tomorrow, poisoned by an old friend, or be caught and executed.”

Liz flinched when he said that word, too fresh was the memory of his near execution. She had tried to put it behind her but she would still wake up in the middle of the night after dreaming about it. The way he was tied to that chair. His hands taped shut. A defenceless wait for the end of time. Lethal injection is said to be more humane that other forms of capital punishment. If that’s what people considered “humane” then she would rather live amongst the monsters.

In her nightmares he doesn’t get saved; the poison creeps its way into his bloodstream, shutting down his organs one by one. Sometimes he fights back, convulsing in pain, screaming for help, his body distorted by aggressive spasms. And sometimes he just keeps his eyes fixed on her through that window, both of them knowing it is the last time his gaze would linger on her. Even then, at the brink of death, he puts on a smile for her. The same smile was on his lips now and it was immeasurably more painful than all the bad dreams combined.

“I’m not afraid of death itself. We’ve become quite close over the years. But I’m scared for–” he choked on his words and needed a moment to pull himself together. “I worry about the people I’ll leave behind. The pain it’ll cause them. As much as I feel undeserving of it, I am beginning to accept the reality that there are people who care about me. That’s also why I didn’t tell you. Because I didn’t want the time we had left to be overshadowed by grief.”

Grief. They have had enough of that between them to fill a thousand lifetimes. It suddenly struck her that the fear of losing him was nothing compared to what she had put him through. He was the one who had lost her before, she the one who died in his arms. And yet here they were. Still surviving. Still together. Until one day they wouldn’t be.

“I know we have our differences and disagreements but then again–” His eyes began to shine, and after gifting her another smile he continued in a much softer voice. “There are those sweet little moments that we have sometimes… I didn’t want them to be tainted. I guess that was rather selfish.”

“No, it wasn’t. I understand why you wanted to keep it a secret.” she said, wiping a tear off her cheek with the sleeve of her sweater. “You didn’t want me to treat you any differently. And you didn’t want to lose control.”

“Yeah…” he swallowed. “But I’m actually glad that it’s out now.”

“You are?”

He nodded. “Yes, because it made me realise something.”

“And what’s that?”

“Life’s too short to hold back.” He barely finished speaking his words of wisdom when he already leaned forward and placed his lips upon hers.

The smallest hint of shock rushed through her but not enough to make her back away. Instead she froze for a split second until she started to melt under his kiss and her instincts took the lead. She pulled him closer, never letting go of his lips as she guided him to lie down upon her. No more space left between them as they lay on top and underneath each other, entangled in blissful discomfort on that tiny sofa.

“I love you, Lizzy.” he managed to say almost without taking his lips off of hers.

Liz was the one tackling the seemingly impossible to break off their kiss, if only temporarily. “Do you want to go over to my bedroom?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”


End file.
